You may have encountered ‘FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted.’ error, sometimes while booting into a VM inside VirtualBox. It sometimes shows ‘No Bootable Medium Found! System halted’ instead of the above message. In this article, we are going to take at how this error can arise, and we will follow the essential steps to fix the problems.
Why Does This Error Arise?
This error can be caused due to two reasons :
- CD/DVD storage controller is labelled as SATA : If you have mounted the ISO file into a SATA storage device controller instead of an IDE, VirtualBox will not boot from it. STAT storage device controller is only used for storage devices such as a Virtual Hard Drive, an optical drive or USB sticks.
- VirtualBox doesn’t detect any ISO file or mounted VDI with an OS : When you first create a Virtual Machine, you have to mount a bootable ISO of an Operating System. If you forgot to mount the ISO, VirtualBox will throw this error at you.
Fixing the Error
Click on the VM of the operating system you are encountering this issue on, and then click on settings (or Press Ctrl + S).
Once the dialog box is open, navigate to the storage settings. From there, click on the controller IDE and the click on ‘Choose a disk file’.
Now, navigate to the directory where you have stored the ISO file and then select it. Don’t forget to tick the checkbox labeled Live CD/DVD and click Ok.
Now try booting again.
Summary
We hope you were able to fix this error in VirtualBox using this article as a guide. Virtualization is a really powerful tool through which you can run multiple systems at the same time. You can even run several servers using this technology at the same time. But it really helps that Oracle’s VirtualBox is very well documented, and all the possible problems can be solved really easily using thorough documentation.